


This Is My Child, He Said

by pollutedstar



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Bisexual Dean Winchester, Blood, Dean Winchester is Sam Winchester's Parent, Episode: s01e05 Bloody Mary, Gen, Homophobic John Winchester, Internalized Homophobia, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, like. we are all aware of this. that's his son, not fuckin. _nc_st since I apparently have I specify that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-05
Updated: 2021-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-18 02:01:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29850870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pollutedstar/pseuds/pollutedstar
Summary: Secrets don’t kill you. How are none of these people getting it? The honesty does. Mary doesn’t kill you with a secret, she kills you by breaking it free. And most minds and bodies just can’t take that.
Relationships: Dean & his sense of self but they're enemies, Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester
Comments: 7
Kudos: 89





	This Is My Child, He Said

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from the quote, "This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man's brains out of his hair. That is my job." (The Road by Cormac McCarthy)

He is driving his father’s Impala, thinking about how often his father used “Joseph” as an alias. The blood is still there. The blood will always be there. He wonders if your eyes bleed when they boil, when you burn alive. He thinks about the blood on Sam’s cheek the night of the fire.

The two of them are covered in it.

* * *

“Dude,” Dean snaps, grabbing his shoulder. “I earned that money.”

Sam scoffs. “You won it in a poker game.”

“Yeah.”

Sam rolls his eyes and Dean knows that’s not a real job, knows it’s not how Sam was going to earn money when he was all grown up, but it’s what they’ve got and dammit Dean hates the way Sam makes him a kid again.

Sorry, Sammy, but mommy’s not perfect. Sometimes he has to play poker in seedy bars and sometimes when he loses poker he has to turn tricks and just because you went off to college and forgot who fed and clothed you for eighteen years doesn’t mean you get to blow it all on the job. You’re not Dad.

* * *

Dean went back to Lawrence, once. Just once. They were four towns over and John was drunk enough that Dean knew he could take the car and split. He waited until Sam was asleep because that kid didn’t need to be keeping Dean’s secrets, and he peeled outta that parking lot like his life depended on it.

He didn’t come back for two days, and he still has scars from John’s welcome home.

* * *

“Why’d you let me fall asleep?”

_Because I know that running from nightmares doesn’t do anything but bring them into your real life. Because I hate to think of all the all-nighters you pulled in college when I wasn’t there to smack you upside the head and tell you to get some rest. Because sometimes while you’re sleeping I read lore to you because I miss when I read you to bed._

“Because I’m an awesome brother.”

* * *

“I’m insane, right?” she asks them, panicked.

“You’re not insane,” he assures her.

“God that makes it so much worse.”

Of course it does. Why is everyone so full of shit in places like this? Sometimes he thinks about Lawrence and he wishes he had lived there, but then he knows he’d have ended up like this. He likes life on the move. He likes life where there’s no hidden lies and people aren’t begging for the truth to be covered up so it doesn’t scare them at night. He likes hunting because there’s nothing more honest than violence, and his hands are those of an honest man.

 _Why am I so full of shit?_ he asks himself.

* * *

“Where’d you go, Dean?” Sam asked, trying to keep the excitement from his voice. “Two whole days, it musta been some place great.”

“It wasn’t,” Dean snapped. “And it was stupid of me to go on my own. That kinda shit will get you killed. You know that, don’t you?”

Sam crossed his arms, pissy the way every thirteen-year-old was, and huffed over his homework. “You sound just like Dad.”

Dean breaks the bathroom mirror later. John doesn’t let him stitch up the cuts.

* * *

“Oh my God. Do you really think her dad could have killed her mom?”

Grow the fuck up. Everybody’s dad’s killed somebody and everybody’s mom is dead. It’s just a matter of time.

* * *

Her gravestone had been awful. Carved in marble with some fucking Bible quote written on it, declaring her a loving mother and wife. He knew Dad picked out the words. He knew it.

* * *

“I just wanted to see her.”

He expected a hit. He expected teeth on the floor. The one thing they didn’t talk about was Mary. John said what John wanted about John’s wife. Dean’s got no idea if he ever met his sons’ mother.

Instead, John took a long swig. A long one. Before sighing out, heavy and bitter, “It’s your goddamn fault she’s dead.”

* * *

“Technically I’m not supposed to have a copy of this,” the cop tells them, yanking out a box of information that he just can’t piece together and he just can’t let go.

Dean looks in that box and all he sees are the rough pages filled margin-to-margin with his dad’s handwriting.

* * *

Secrets don’t kill you. How are none of these people getting it? The honesty does. Mary doesn’t kill you with a secret, she kills you by breaking it free. And most minds and bodies just can’t take that.

* * *

“We fought over you. You couldn’t do a thing right, not even as a kid. Always knew there was something fucked up inside you, and your mom… she just couldn’t see it.” John looked at him, forced Dean to meet his eyes. “Sam, I think Sam’s just like that because it’s what happens on the road. Think something turned him rotten along the way. But you? You’ve been like this from the start. Mama’s boy.”

Oh. _Mama’s boy._ So that’s what this was about.

“She wouldn’t let me come to bed that night. ‘Cause I said I wasn’t raising a fucking pansy. She didn’t take kindly to that. And that’s why she was in that room. Because you kept me away from her.”

Dean nearly falls to his knees with shame. He tastes the bile rise up from his throat. Tastes the blood of his split lip tearing itself apart.

“Don’t go to her fucking grave again.” Another drink. “Not like there’s a body in that coffin anyway.”

* * *

Great. Now Charlie’s got somebody’s death on her hands, too. What is it with this town and secrets? How can you walk by the same people every day and not break down and confess? Shit like that can only live on the road.

* * *

He pulls the car over, rain and darkness be damned. They could get hit for all he cares. He’s on the side that would take the damage anyway.

When’s he going to get it through this kid’s supposedly smart head? Jess was not his fault. He knows it because he knows his brother, knows him down to his molecular level, knows how he cut his hair with safety scissors when they were kids and keeps a running count in his head of every monster Sam’s killed since he first picked up a gun. He knows him.

He knew him.

Okay, Sam hasn’t told him everything. Fine. Brothers keep secrets. But children aren’t supposed to.

He’s glad he never put his mom through the hell of watching him grow up.

* * *

“Sammy? Sammy!” He kneels down beside him, afraid for his baby brother's life.

“It’s Sam,” he coughs out.

Not when you’re bleeding from your eyes it’s not. Just let me wipe the blood from your face. That’s my job.

* * *

Sam probably thinks it’s poetic or some shit. The two of them, going out together, equals. Dean doesn’t because they’re not supposed to go out together. Sam’s not supposed to go out at all.

He thinks quick on his knees, always has. And he grabs whatever’s closest because the only life that matters is about to be written on the back of his mirror.

He supports his limping, lying brother out to the car. He sets him in the passenger seat and wipes the blood from his face. He ruffles his hair when there’s nothing but a faint red smear left.

Sam falls asleep before Dean even hits the gas.

Dean hopes this gives Sam some kind of closure. Hopes that when his baby brother wakes up, the secrets will be out in the open and aired for the two of them to deal with together.

Dean keeps looking in the rearview. He can’t stop meeting his own eyes.

He lets the blood stay.

**Author's Note:**

> Okay I don't generally write fics where Cas is not there but I cannot stop thinking about the implications of Dean's bleeding eyes I simply cannot....


End file.
